Vincennes Avenue

Veteran Tribune transportation reporter Jon Hilkevitch is usually effective at covering highway and transit news but, when it comes to bicycle projects, he often misses the mark. For example, around the time of the Divvy launch, in spring of last year, he wrote a couple of articles painting the system as a dysfunctional ripoff. By August, he wrote another piece that all but admitted he was wrong.

Current conditions at Milwaukee and Manila.

Our extended New Bikeways Week wraps up today with a look at the 2.65-mile stretch of new protected and buffered lanes that the Chicago Department of Transportation recently installed on Vincennes Avenue from 84th Street to 103rd Street. Vincennes, a diagonal road leading downtown from the Far Southwest Side, is designated as a bike-priority Spoke Route in the city’s Streets for Cycling 2020 Plan. In general, the agency has installed buffered lanes with curbside car parking on the west side of Vincennes, and curbside bike lanes, with striped buffers and flexible posts to discourage motorists from driving in them, on the east side.

We’re currently in the midst of a bike lane building boom. Earlier this year the Chicago Department of Transportation completed groundbreaking protected lanes on Milwaukee from Kinzie to Elston, which involved removing about 50 percent of the parking spaces. Buffered lanes were striped on Wells from Chicago to North. Recently CDOT completed buffered lanes on a two-mile stretch of Madison between Pulaski and Central, and this week the department began or continued installation of the following 11 miles of bikeways: